Research Paper on:
Hardware Marketed by Microsoft

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
on the computer hardware market, it is useful to look briefly at the history of the company and its relationship with other computer manufacturers. In the early 1980s, it appeared  that the hardware market would be totally dominated by IBM-Compaq; computers which did not conform to the IBM standard were not compatible, which made it difficult to transfer data from  IBM machines to those of other makes. Consequently, other manufacturers such as Hewlett Packard abandoned their CP/M based systems and concentrated instead on manufacturing machines which were IBM compatible: gradually,  IBM lost their stranglehold on the market. In the lead amongst the companies racing to produce IBM compatibles were Intel and Microsoft. With the development of the Windows operating system,  and subsequent upgrades and improvements, Microsoft had virtually cornered the market in both hardware and software by the 1990s.  Particularly badly hit amongst their competitors was Apple: as the manufacturers of IBM compatibles reduced their prices in order to stay in the market, it was  possible to obtain an IBM compatible running Windows for half the price of the Apple equivalent. Apple tried to sue Microsoft, alleging that Microsoft had plagiarised Apples design, but the  case failed. Microsoft acknowledged that there were similarities between the two types of hardware, but maintained that they had been influenced by a now obsolete computer, the Xerox Alto, rather  than by the Apple Mac. By the end of the 1990s, virtually all computers ran Windows and it appeared that Apple would not survive.  However, Apple finally found a corner of the hardware market which had not already been co-opted by Microsoft. New users found both the IBM-compatibles